Best way to rip DVD's?

Yes, and remember that DVDs are already compressed when you buy them. ;-)

Edit: Removed Link since it was broken.

natethomas Wrote:Don't set quality. Set a goal output file size. If you keep the original sound, a goal output would typically be 1.5gb or 2gb, if it's a long movie.

And, of course, compressing an already compressed movie is never going to help.

This goes against the advice of the Handbrake team. Setting a quality level lets the size move as necessary based on movie length, and scene complexity.

GJones Wrote:This goes against the advice of the Handbrake team. Setting a quality level lets the size move as necessary based on movie length, and scene complexity.

QFT

If you want the best quality possible, just use MakeMKV. It will use the video from the disk and dump it into an mkv container without transcoding. I'm fairly sure that it also works with bluray drives, but I don't have one myself.

If you want to conserve file size and still have great quality, I use these settings in Handbrake (I use the GUI, not the command line tool). You can paste them into a file called 'whatever.plist' and import it with Handbrake.

Since this is relatively fresh, I thought you might still be in the market for info...

I looked into this in a big way some time ago while trying to rip my X-Files collection to my hard drive.

I tried x264 then and found like you did that the quality was terrible. I couldn't understand why everyone was jumping up and down about it.

I think for HD content it might be better, but certainly for standard definition I found that using mencoder (part of the open source mplayer) and 2-pass encoding to an avi \ xvid worked amazingly well. So much so I was astonished just how close to the original content it was.

It also copies the audio (-oac copy) meaning that it keeps the original format.

If you're interested, this is what I used (replace any bit within <> braces)

[At the command line]
C:\Mplayer\mencoder -vf softskip,harddup -aid 128 "<DVD Path>\VIDEO_TS\*.VOB" -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts min_iquant=1:max_iquant=31:min_pquant=1:max_pquant=31:min_bquant=1:max_bquant=31​:vhq=1:bvhq=1:me_quality=6:hq_ac:chroma_me:chroma_opt:max_bframes=2:trellis:bitr​ate=1200:pass=<PASS NUMBER>:keyframe_boost=30:kfthreshold=1:kfreduction=40:overflow_control_strength=15:​max_overflow_improvement=15:quant_type=mpeg -o <output filename>.avi

This command needs to be run twice, first substituting <PASS NUMBER> for pass=1 and then pass=2.

This gave me file sizes of roughly 500Mb per episode, so ~1Gb per 90minutes.

You can always play around with the bitrate figure to see how much it affects the quality\size.

To only encode a snippet of a movie, use -ss <seconds to skip> -endpos <seconds to encode>

The 2 pass encoding takes AGES but to me it's worth it. YMMV but by encoding a 10 minute snippet you can get a feel for both the quality and time it'll take.

HTH

JD

Playing the devils advocate, id say bittorrent was by far the best app for minimum filesize/maximum quality

.....OR

You could trust that the Handbrake developers actually know what they are doing and use their defaults (which amazingly work rather well).

HandbrakeCLI --preset "High Profile" -i /dev/dvd -o MovieName.mkv -f mkv

Of course, if you don't care about file size, MakeMKV is the better choice (makemkvcon --minlength 1200 mkv disc:0 all .). But since the OP does care about file size, the Handbrake suggestion above is a good compromise between size and quality.


PS Setting Handbrake's quality to 100% makes no sense. The quality is measured by the uncompressed result of rendering each frame. The normal compression ratio for Handbrake is 20% (-q 0.20) and is extremely close to the original DVD quality. Upping the ratio a bit (-q 0.17) produces only marginally better images and about 15-20% increase in file size.

hrotti Wrote:Playing the devils advocate, id say bittorrent was by far the best app for minimum filesize/maximum quality

And you would be wrong. If the question had been "how do I pull content down from the internet using a peer-to-peer file sharing mechanism?" you might have been closer. As it is, he is looking to backup content he owns.

I've recently gone through this with my own DVD collection - I originally wanted to use Handbrake to encode all my disks butin the end I've decided to leave them as Video_TS folders. My own opinion is if you have a big'ish screen (>42") and aim to have XBMC running in your lounge as your main film source then you may as well invest in a NAS and store the complete DVD in it's highest possible quality.

Ripping and encoding is a time consuming task and with so many encoding options you don't want to make the wrong decision!

The thing I hate about MakeMKV is that it doesn't detect forced subtitles for DVDs.